Steve Jobs was known to have been an admirer of Sony products. In fact, he liked the VAIO line of PCs so much that he wanted to let Sony put Mac OS X on them.

According to writer Nobuyuki Hayashi, ex-Sony president Kunitake Ando met with Steve Jobs in Hawaii in 2001. After playing a round of golf along with other executives, the Sony president was surprised by Jobs and another Apple executive at the end of the course. The two were holding up VAIO computers running OS X. It was his way of proposing that Sony work with Apple as a partner, a rare exception that probably would have caught everyone by surprise.

As we all know, the deal never happened. The timing wasn’t right for such a partnership, as Sony’s VAIO was just gaining popularity. The VAIO team had also optimized everything specifically for Windows and opposed the idea, asking if it was worth it. But if it did happen, today’s Apple and Sony could’ve been really different. Although we wonder how different: both VAIOs and Macs cost an arm and a leg, so…

[via Nobi, The Verge]